y wanted greater democracy, that was not really change so much as it was an affirmation of the existing order. Those who gained votes and other social privileges were saying, in effect, “The existing order is pretty good; it is so good in fact that I want a greater role in it. I want a bigger piece of it.” These were no sans-culottes cutting off the heads of kings and aristocrats as the Frenchmen did in their frenzied Terror. No; these were Englishmen who desired home rule, who at first sought to preserve local autonomy and loyalty to the King, not to Parliament; and it was only later that they slipped into the position of demanding sovereignty. The second half of the rebuttal to the thesis that states that the war was a revolution because of the change it wrought is this: since all of the wars the United States has fought have yielded dramatic social and political change, then they must all be revolutionary. The World Wars, Korea and Vietnam, the American Civil War: all were revolutions in this context. But then the term begins to lose its meaning to a sort of rhetorical inflation, just as what were once bit players in Hollywood are now listed as “stars,” and what were once “stars” are now “superstars.” (What’s next, novas, and supernovas?) To put it another way, if the wars were all revolutionary, then none of them were. This brings back Turner’s statement quoted at the beginning of this paper. What he said in 1920 could easily have been said a few years after the end of the Vietnam War. Or it could just as easily be said today, with reference to the upheavals being caused by the Information Revolution. What of the events in Eastern Europe and their consequences in the United States as the realization hits that the Cold War appears to be over? What the colonists sought was control that they had already been accustomed to having. Parliament was not in the colonists’ R...
